So your definition of neocolonialism boils down to 'has trade and diplomatic relations with the US and France'?

And isn't that quite offensive against the African states? You imply that they could not have created an intranational community without centering it around Western powers, no?

How, in your opinion, is ECOWAS a tool for neocolonialism?

Even if you don't get a job immediately, with a 25h week you should have a lot of time to upskill and get yourself employable.

There are a lot of free resources for anything from programming, MS Office (seriously, Excel will get you a job), languages, and even science (though probably more as a setup for any kind of degree).

You are not reading my comments. The closures did not reduce deaths/infections by enough to justify having them, that is the argument.

I feel like you only read half my comment each time.

You will always reach a point of diminishing marginal returns with measures taken, and you have to evaluate the impact of the measure against it's effectiveness.

The argument is that school closures likely did not contribute sufficiently to justify their extent of implementation, meaning you probably would have wanted a few more people dying to avoid the shortfalls in children's education and socialisation that you have now. The ends, in retrospective, arguably did not justify the means.

I mean, comparing countries with it's peers is what you should do. I could also have taken Argentina, Bulgaria, or Russia, but at the end you'll see that Germany did fairly well.

I think the question is somewhere how much death we accept against the impact of avoiding it. In this case, as I said before, there seems increasingly the opinion that school closures as a measure did not have the impact that justified its extent of use.

Question is, what business model would you support?

Ads are the thing that pay for a lot of services most people use in daily lives. Imagine you needed a paid subscription for your email, your search engine, browser, social media account(s)...

Lemmy is fun and all, but eventually it will need to expand and pay for server costs and so on. Yes, perhaps it will be carried by enthusiastic community members, but that's just a higher paid subscription for a few rather than many.

I agree fully with you that the level of commercialisation is beyond crazy by now, and many developments do not have the user in mind. But that's not on the business model itself, but the companies' decisions.

They don't say that. They said the extent of closures was inappropriate for the severity of the pandemic and the role of schools.

And Germany did quite well during COVID, per capita deaths are far lower than, for example, in the US, UK, Italy, or France.

Not sure about other countries, but at least in Europe we had quite a few comments, including by health officials, that the school closures should not have been done and upheld to the extent that they were.

And I agree, the impact on learning and children's mental health was not justified by the real or potential dangers of the pandemic imho

Edit: One comment from the German Health Minister here, describing prolonged school closures as a mistake

You are right, the spot exchange rate at a given point in time is random and tells you nothing (nothing!) about the value or strength of a currency. Japan is a great example.

What, however, does indicate a weakening or economic downturn is the uncontrolled depreciation of a currency, which errodes savings, threatens foreign debt paybacks, and makes imports more expensive

The Yen is relatively stable for decades at its spot. The Rubel is sliding against monetary and fiscal efforts, which indicates deeper macroeconomic issues.

In all fairness, FPTP did create one of the oldest, most successful democracies that ever existed on the planet. Now, I'm not saying it shouldn't be reformed (it should be), but calling it a straight up terrible no good isn't right either

Better question at this point would be 'how many world wars have they seen already?'

YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD

What the actual fuck

'hey man, what date is it today?' 'well it's the 15th of 2023, August'

I'm sure not everyone will agree, but honestly, I kind of stopped caring too much. I've been using Instagram, Google, Android, Apple, and many other service providers for years and none seems to know a lot about me based on the stuff I see being advertised to me.

None of them seem to have figured out what languages I speak (I get a lot of language courses for English and German, but I'm native in both), what my education level is (I get a lot of 'study your bachelor or master here or there or online' despite having two master's degrees), where I really live (lots of British stuff always, but I live out of Europe), or what my hobbies are (lots of mobile games that I wouldn't touch with a stick).

Yeah, it seems they get the basics (I'm male, below 35, I am interested in educational stuff), but that could be anyone... And if I can use their services for tree for them to put me in a category with some 10M others, I'm kinda okay

Ah yes, the fresh news of the day lol

But seems like Lemmy has some issues in general with the sorting algorithm right now, I've seen quite a lot of old stuff in Hot recently

I think freight logistics is another topic though. (Last mile) Deliveries will likely stay on trucks and vans, simply because it isn't feasible to have tracks to everyone's house. Though increased usage of trains would probably still be cheaper and more efficient here.

My point of argument was related to personal travelling (getting to work, buying groceries, ...), as the comment I replied to discussed. Those are activities we could or should probably try to move onto rails or more generally public transport rather than trying to have the same number of cars but just electrified.

Though there might also be regional differences in feasibility. European cities tend to be much more built around public transport and walkable distances, making it much easier to adopt such measures than most of rest of the world (for various reasons).

So you'll buy an electric car for some 20k+ once that car breaks down to haul your frequent furniture and lumber purchases?

Because the discussion isn't about 'I have a car and won't exchange it for a train' but 'moving transportation onto trains instead of electric cars would be a lot more beneficial as the future of transportation'

I guess it raises a fundamental question: If not ads, what else would Facebook male money off? Running the operations is costly and something has to pay for it.

I am aware that Norways ban is temporary (and I'm hella glad that at least the EU/European countries stand up to big tech on data security), but just not allowing the use of user data will probably not work as a solution.

Wikipedia's model sounds nice, but the cost of operations are by magnitudes different. I think it's a question that will also affect other platforms (like it did affect reddit and will affect Lemmy at some point).